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passages from an old volume of life-第20章

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oicings。  If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental one; which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless; and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace; and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted; and giving place to an irresponsible tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin;then we had better sing a dirge; and leave this idle assemblage; and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the air; and tear down the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there should be silence; and not the echo of noisy gladness; in our streets; and the emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its future should be traced; not in fire; but in ashes。

If; on the other hand; this war is no accident; but an inevitable result of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean; unworthy end; but for national life; for liberty everywhere; for humanity; for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless; but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in the name of the sacred; inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm; conjured up by the imagination of the weak; acted on by the craft of the cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our perdition; the movement of past years is reversed; and every revolution carries us farther and farther from the centre of the vortex; until; by God's blessing; we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make them seem true; or even probable; to the doubting soul; in an hour's discourse; then we may join without madness in the day's exultant festivities; the bells may ring; the cannon may roar; the incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air; and the children who are to inherit the fruit of these toiling; agonizing years; go about unblamed; making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism。

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a little sooner; or a little later; but it must have come。  The disease of the nation was organic; and not functional; and the rough chirurgery of war was its only remedy。

In opposition to this view; there are many languid thinkers who lapse into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived; or if this or that other man had not ceased to live; the country might have gone on in peace and prosperity; until its felicity merged in the glories of the millennium。  If Mr。 Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if Mr。 Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr。 Phillips; the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium; had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr。 Clay had still sounded in the senate…chamber to smooth the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion;we might have been spared this dread season of convulsion。  All this is but simple Martha's faith; without the reason she could have given: 〃If Thou hadst been here; my brother had not died。〃

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling; who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride their waves。  It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to continent; but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own bubbles。  If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human progress; how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind?  But in the more limited ranges referred to; no fact is more familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once; so that genius comes in clusters; and shines rarely as a single star。  You may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid…builders of the earliest recorded antiquity; in the evolution of Greek architecture; and in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries; growing out of the soil with stem and bud and blossom; like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven。  You may see the same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters; the sculptors; the scholars of 〃Leo's golden days〃; in the authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this century following that dreary period; suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of Hayley。  You may accept the fact as natural; that Zwingli and Luther; without knowing each other; preached the same reformed gospel; that Newton; and Hooke; and Halley; and Wren arrived independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their hands meeting; as it were; as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus; in search of the dim; unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell; that Wheatstone and Morse; that Daguerre and Niepce; were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end。  You see why Patrick Henry; in Richmond; and Samuel Adams; in Boston; were startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty; and why the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of Massachusetts。  This law of simultaneous intellectual movement; recognized by all thinkers; expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and by Mr。 Herbert Spencer among recent writers; is eminently applicable to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the present conflict。

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this or that enthusiast or fanatic。  It was the consequence of a movement in mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions; and the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most completely; or who talked longest and loudest about it。  Long before the accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the halls of the Capitol; long before the 〃Liberator〃 opened its batteries; the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted。  Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions; well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric。 Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God。  Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery。  De Tocqu
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